What is the relation between beauty and God?

The whole existence of a singular witness of faith, Saint Augustine, answers this question: one might observe that all his meditations were dominated by the subjects of God and of beauty, which he considered intimately connected to each other. It is he himself who acknowledges this in his longing expression in the Confessions, in which the "You" of this invocation is addressed to "He" who is beauty: "Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee!" (X, 27, 38). Augustine admits that the very beauty of creatures had kept him far from the Creator and he confesses that He had touched him through His beauty through the very path of the senses thanks to which we perceive beauty in all its expressions: "You were within me, I was on the outside: there I searched for You and, misshapen as I was, I plunged myself onto the beautiful things you made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee. Things held me far from Thee, which, unless they were in Thee, were not at all. Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odours, and I drew in breath and panted for Thee. I tasted, and now I am filled with hunger and thirst for You. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace" (ib.). What strikes us in this text is how the senses are the pathway for the encounter with God’s holiness. Hearing, eyesight, olfaction, taste and touch are touched and affected by beauty: initially – confesses Augustine – they were affected by the beauty of all that is created; later by the ultimate Beauty, the Maker of all other forms of beauty.

Augustine’s itinerary seems therefore to be a journey from beauty to Beauty, from the penultimate to the Ultimate, so as to then rediscover the sense and the measure of the beauty of all that exists, in the light of the foundation of every beauty. It is love that unifies in a pregnant manner this path of beauty: beauty in fact has great power over us because it attracts us with bonds of love. In the Confessions we can also find the following consideration: "I then loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, "Do we love any thing but the beautiful?"" (IV, 13, 20). The movement of beauty is simply the movement of love: "ordo amoris" is the world enlightened by original and ultimate beauty. But why does the beauty of love affect us so strongly? Where does its strong attraction originate? Why does beauty attract love? Augustine is extremely rigorous in posing these questions, as he reflects on his own progress: "What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? For unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them." (ib.). He is faced with two different answers: according to the first one the formal reason for the existence of beauty lies within the very things we consider beautiful; according to the other answer, the reason for beauty lies in the subject, which derives pleasure from it. This is also more simply set out as: is something beautiful because it is beautiful, or is it beautiful because we like it? Is it beauty that attracts or is it attraction itself, and therefore the pleasure it causes that is at the origin of beauty’s charm? For those who like Augustine have achieved a strong sense regarding the objectivity of truth, which enlightens from the profoundest both the heart and life, there is no doubt or hesitation in choosing between these two alternatives: "Things are loved because they are beautiful" (see De vera religione 32, 59). The beauty of all that is beautiful does not depend on the taste of the subject, but is inscribed in the truth of matters. We consider beautiful all that presents an intimate, organic "convenientia" of the parts that compose it, a "con-vening" that emerges from the profoundness: beauty reproduces in a fragment the "numbers of the sky"; the finite "form" reflects infinite, celestial harmony. It is also in this manner that beauty is identified with love, understood as the order and harmony of those who love: and therefore the highest form of Beauty will consist in the highest form of love, the divine Trinity, the "ordo amoris" in its supreme form: "In truth you see the Trinity when you see love" (see De Trinitate, 8, 8, 12). "They are three: The Lover, the Loved One and Love" (ib., 8, 10, 14). This "ordo amoris" is shared with the creatures, whose beauty will consist in the reflection of the total unity in the parts of the fragment, suitable arranged among themselves, the mark of the Trinity in creatures: hence Augustine can state that: "I love all when I love my God" (Confessioni, X, 6, 8). One can therefore state that all beauty comes from the Trinity and is attracted by It: "In the Trinity there is the supreme source of all things, the beauty is perfect, the joyfulness complete" (see De Trinitate, VI, 10, 12). This attraction of supreme Beauty; this love inspires the entire movement of the creations return to the Creator: the beauty of the ultimate Love giving rise to that love which is capable of permitting the interior man to follow the path that leads to perfect joy in God, all in all. The path of beauty is hence revealed as the path of God the Trinity, and therefore as the path to redemption and truth: in beauty all is united, all is justified in its ultimate sense.

Wisdom of Greek beauty is thereby assumed but also outdated: the key lies in the harmony of the forms, but the transcendence that flows through it – revealed on the abyss of the creative act – leads well beyond a final mundane beauty, towards the shore – tasted as an anticipation and deposit – of the eternal beauty of God-Trinity-Love. This ultimate beauty will be victorious over any negation to it: just as all that exists only exists for love, so all that is beautiful, also because Supreme Beauty participates in each of His objects of love, exists even when weak eyes or a heart afflicted by evil are incapable of understanding its mysterious and fertile meaning... The question however remains: does this beauty also justify the disorder and the evil that devastate the earth? Is the death of the Son suffered in the hour of abandonment on the Cross already forever overcome by the Paschal victory? Or does the suffering of He who John in the Gospel calls "the good Shepherd" (see Jn 10, 11: "o poimén o kalòs") call upon us to discern other paths of Beauty? In fact it is the same Augustine who answers these questions in a wonderful page of his commentary of John’s first Letter, the "Letter of love": "Two flutes play in a different manner – he writes -, but one same Spirit blows in them. The first says: ‘He is the most beautiful among the children of mankind’ (Sal 45,3); and the second one, with Isaiah, says: ‘we have seen Him: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness’ (Is 53,2). The two flutes are played by one single Spirit: therefore their sound is harmonious. You must not renounce listening to them but rather try and understand them. Let as question the Apostle Paul to hear how he explains the perfect harmony of the two flutes for us. The first one plays: ‘The most beautiful among the children of mankind’; ‘Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God’ (Phil 2, 6). It is in this that He surpasses the beauty of the children of mankind. Let the second flute play: ‘We have seen Him: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness’: hence He ‘emptied himself taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man’ (Phil 2, 7). ‘There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness’ so as to provide you with beauty and comeliness. Which beauty? Which comeliness? The love of mercy that permits you to run while loving and love while running... Look at He who has made you beautiful" (see In Io. Ep., IX, 9). It is the love with which Christ has loved us that transfigures Him, "a man of sorrows in front of whom one covers one face" (Is 53, 3), in "more beautiful than the children of mankind": the crucified love is the redeeming beauty; it is the mercy with which He consigns himself to death for us that makes beautiful also the "Man of sorrows". If the route of the Gospel is above all that of conversion to the heart of Christ, then the beauty of His crucified love is par excellence the path to sanctification and evangelisation: in this crucified love the disciples encounter the Loved One and allow themselves to be gathered by Him in the unity of one single flock with only one Shepherd. Life according to the Spirit and the evangelising mission discover in the mercy of the Crucified Christ the path on which they may advance towards the beauty of God, the mysterious call of ultimate beauty which must always be answered.

The Good Shepherd does not abandon us on this path: it is He who makes beautiful the hearts of those who love Him and who fills with His beauty the work of those who believe in Him. This is wonderfully emphasised by Pavel Florenskij, the "Russian Leonardo da Vinci", a genius in the fields of science and theological and philosophical thought, Christ’s priest, who died a martyr’s death under Stalin’s barbarism: in commenting Matthew 5,16: "Your light must shine so brightly before men that they can see your good works, and glorify your father who is in heaven" – He writes: " ‘Your good actions’ does not at all mean ‘good actions’ in the philanthropic and moral sense: ‘tà kalà érga’ means ‘beautiful actions’, luminous and harmonious revelations of the spiritual personality – especially a luminous beautiful face, with a beauty that allows man’s "interior light" to expand externally, and then, won over by the irresistibility of this light, ‘men’ glorify the celestial Father, whose image on earth then shines" (Le porte regali. Saggio sull’icona, Adelphi, Milan, 1999⁷, 50). The testimony – the particular path followed by the annunciation of the Gospel – is inseparable from the bright shining of Christ’s beauty in the actions of the disciple interiorly transfigured by the Spirit: there where mercy is irradiated, redeeming beauty appears, there the celestial father is glorified, there the unity of the disciples of the Loved One grows, united to Him as disciples of His crucified and resurrected love. And it is in the liturgy of the Church that the path of this beauty that frees and redeems is offered in a particular manner: once again it is Florenskij who celebrates this gift in the manner in which it is accomplished in the mysterious encounter between time and eternity, achieved by the celebration. Remembering one of the liturgies he had celebrated in the Church on the hills of Makovec, looking towards Sergiev Possad’s great Monastery (the "Lavra"), the heart of Russian Christianity, this is how he describes the singular beauty of the liturgical celebration, the symbol of the world’s symbols, in which heaven dwells on the earth and eternity puts up its tents in time, transforming space into the "holy, mysterious temple, that shines with a celestial beauty": "The merciful Lord permitted me to stand next to His throne. Evening was falling. The golden rays danced in joy, the sun appeared as a solemn hymn to Eden. The West paled, resigned, and the altar also faced the West, placed on the peak of the hill. A chain of clouds covered the Lavra like a pearl necklace. From the window over the altar one could see clear distant details and the Lavra dominated like a celestial Jerusalem. At Vesper the hymn ‘Light of peace’ sealed the setting of the sun. The dying sun lowered itself sumptuously. Melodies as ancient as time interlaced and vanished; as did also the ribbons of blue incense. The reading of the canon pulsed rhythmically. Something in the shadows returned to mind, something that reminded one of Paradise, and the sadness caused by its loss was transformed mysteriously by the joy of returning. And when we sung ‘Gloria to You who showed us the light’ the darkness outside, also made of light, clearly fell, and then the Evening Star shone through the altar window and once again hearts were filled with a joy that does not vanish, the joy felt in the dusk of the cavern. The mystery of the evening mingled with the mystery of morning and both were only one thing" (On Makovec Hill, 20. 5. 1913, in Id., The cherubic heart. Mystical and theological essays, Piemme, Casale Monferrato 1999, 260ff). Those who celebrate the Eucharist, those who really experience it with the spirit and the heart, meet the "good Shepherd" and in this very manner are touched and transformed by His beauty: in particular, those called upon to preside over the liturgy are also inseparably called upon to welcome and experience "that" Beauty, the Beauty of God, experienced there where eternity plants its tents in time, so as to tell everyone that Jesus Christ is not only Truth and Goodness, but that He is also real Beauty, and that it is not only right and truthful to follow Him but that it is also immensely beautiful and the source of a beauty that is an authentic anticipation of eternity: the beauty which the saints have experienced and irradiated, the beauty of holiness nourished by faith and lived in mercy to the very end.